Selling With a Smile
There is a lyric for an Eagle's song that goes something like "Some women know how to open a door with just a smile." These same women can do wonders selling with just a smile. In particular I think about an associate that owned and operated an auto parts store for several years. She had a woman working for her that had a special talent selling with just a smile. Even now some 25 or so years later she talks about this woman's ability to sell. When a man walked in the door of the store, this woman had a talent for estimating how much money he had in his pocket. She made it her goal to take every cent of it. What is more, she did it and the man walked out the door a happy customer and a smile from the woman. Often she was able to sell at list price. Of course, she was allowed to set the selling price on their STORE POS SYSTEM at the time of sale.
There are a couple of other out of the ordinary selling situations with women that I can remember. One woman would lean forward on the counter when talking to men. She got a lot of attention and brought in many regular customers. However, sometimes that attention can cause problems. One parts store had a young attractive woman delivering parts to repair shops. When she arrived at a repair shop, all work stopped until she left. That was all well and good until the wives of the repair shop owners noticed this and complained to the parts store owner. The young woman was soon history and the replacement driver was a pleasant lady in her 60s.
Labels: Selling to men, Store POS System, using a smile to sell
Watching out for problems
The other day an associate was telling me how she looked for problems when she owned an auto parts store. She scanned the daily summary from her store POS system examining the gross profit margin for each invoice. Those invoices that are below or above the threshold that she established for her business were a concern. She looked closely at the items on the invoice, the customer that made the purchase and the clerk that ran the invoice. Sometimes a low profit margin was related to a pricing error, an employee giving a friend a price break at her expense or the customer received a rebate. Rebates are a necessary part of business for some products and hopefully your store POS system will account for your rebate when computing your daily gross profit margin. Also, store POS systems will often tag invoices on the daily summary when a sales clerk sells an item at a price different from what should have been priced to that customer. Tagged invoices beg for your attention. Scanning through invoices on a regular basis is not fun, but it helps you stop small problems from becoming big problems.
Labels: daily summary, gross profit margin, Store POS System
Keep Control While on Travel
Many store owners or managers want to control their store even when they don't show up for work. It is easy to do and the cost is minor. This can be a real godsend for those that have to be gone for health problems, family matters, long overdue vacations or whatever. You only need a fixed address for your internet connection, any of the widely available inexpensive software packages designed for this application, a laptop computer and an internet connection where you are staying while away from work. The biggest expense is the laptop and there are many new ones that are under $400. If you want to print reports, you will have to bring along a printer and you can get good new laser printers for under $130. Be sure to save the boxes so that you can ship them to your destination with minimal hassle. Most hotels and motels, many restaurants and even airports have wireless internet connections available. Sitting in your home, hotel room or vacation home you can use your Store POS System to do almost everything that you could if you were sitting in your office working on the computer. The one important thing that you can't do is to remove your backup media and put it in a safe place. Hopefully, an employee will do this for you. Oh yes, the users that I know of that manage from remote locations have not had any problems with computer viruses. However, one would do well to resist the temptation to surf the web on either your server computer at the office or your laptop for remote computing.
Labels: backups, computer viruses, Manage while you are gone, Store POS System
